In his production notes for The Glass Menagerie, playwright Tennessee Williams boldly called for a ‘new, plastic theatre which must take the place of the exhausted theatre of realistic conventions’. Its keynote would be expressionism; reality would be apprehended through atmosphere and evocative, dreamlike effects. In this vie for form-breaking innovation, Jay Miller, artistic director of The Yard, shares a kinship. He’s been provoking and upending London’s theatrical sensibilities ever since he masqueraded as a property developer and set up The Yard in a disused warehouse in 2011. Williams’ semi-autobiographical play, a blend of surreal experiment and reminiscence, makes this a fittingly bittersweet ending for a building that is about to fall and fade into memory.
In Miller’s inventive hands, Williams’ play is a flickering study of fragility and psychological obsession. The audience is invited into the suffocating Southern world of the Wingfield family, whose various bids to take flight, psychological and literal, fail to take them very far. Tom Wingfield (Tom Varey) is trapped in a hopelessly menial warehouse job but has soaring literary ambitions. He lives with his mother, Amanda Wingfield (Sharon Small), a faded belle who insists she was adored once too, parading the seventeen gentleman callers of her youth like prize jonquils. Her attempts to marry off Laura (Eva Morgan), her beautiful yet crippled daughter, leaves the girl with little more than broken glass when seasoned charmer Jim O’Connor (Jad Sayegh) comes knocking.
Williams’ characters are embodied to perfection by Miller’s cast. Here are no Southern grotesques but carefully created portraits. Tom Varey’s angsty poet quietly burns like the cigarettes he smokes, spray-painting the apartment walls blue with his melancholy and tragically suppressing the familial love he feels is keeping him incarcerated. Jad Sayegh’s slick and assured Jim provides a welcome contrast. His ego is puffed up by his public speaking classes and narcissistic romantic flirtations. The female characters are handled equally impressively. Eva Morgan’s Laura is full of muted pain, living more in her menagerie of glass than in reality with its attendant disappointments. Sharon Small, who has the hardest job, is a winning mix of tenderness and stoicism, a real feat given that her indulgently literary lines could easily veer into grating loquacity.
The Yard’s firm favourite Lambdog1066 takes charge of the costume design, triumphantly excavating new sartorial life from Williams’ text. The Wingfields’ clothes are layered, stitched, and asymmetrical, suggesting a life of make-do and mend where the present is woven into the past. This aesthetic marries well with Cécile Trémolières cutaway set design, which reconstructs a room through the eyes of memory, where only the most poignant things remain. She foregrounds brokenness in battered vintage furniture and places a mound of glittering moondust centre stage, into which are planted incongruous objects that seem to have floated in from memory.
And of course, in memory, as Tom explains, everything happens to music. As such, Miller’s Menagerie becomes a revolving jukebox of tracks. Complementing the lunar landscape and lighting designer Sarah Readman’s melancholic blue washes is John Maus’s lonesome song Hey Moon. Echoes of Beyoncé’s Hold Up ricochet as Laura’s heart breaks, and in a characteristically frisky move, Stay by Shakespeare’s Sister – the epithet given to Laura by her gentleman caller – is played with a wink. Needless to say, Josh Anio Grigg, who worked on the sound design, was having a lot of fun, but it sometimes strayed towards sonic excess.
Miller’s The Glass Menagerie is a swan song of staggering achievement. It’s experimental theatre as Williams dreamed it – uncompromisingly true to life for its imaginative deviation from it. As the Yard’s walls are peeled away and the old warehouse doors are shut, my glass heart might break a little. See you in 2026, dear Yard. Until then, we will miss your cheekiness, bravado, and unfaltering ability to outsmart the West End.
By Tennessee Williams
Director: Jay Miller
Photo credits: Manuel Harlan
Cast includes: Sharon Small; Tom Varey; Eva Morgan; Jad Sayegh.
Until: Saturday 10th May 2025
Running Time: 2 hours and 30 minutes, including a 15-minute interval
11th March 2025